Young Krylov, who often showed up at the museum despite the prohibitions of his mother, who feared for the exhibits, felt that he was closer to knowledge there than he was in his classes at school. Knowledge yet to be discovered but quietly promised held a pleasure shaped somehow like the complex space of an old cathedral, from volume to volume, its surfeit on top, where the white-washed dome was rough and uneven, like the shell of an ancient egg. Later on it occurred to Krylov that it was temple configurations that were best suited to the introducing, teaching, and placing of exhibits. In some prof ound way they corresponded to the templates of human thought. In any church he saw a misinterpreted museum.
The conical crystals chopped off at the root and transferred to the plinths of rusty cloth possessed in full measure a quality that had bewitched young Krylov since his very first glimmers of consciousness: transparency. Man's early memories have an obscure and confused origin. When later Krylov had occasion to spend time on business in the ancient emir's capital where he had passed his first years, he had the feeling that he had not once lived amid these huge glazed ceramics and crude, oxidized copper engravings, this Asiatic vegetation, but that he had dreamed it all. The dream of his early childhood was vibrant and trembled at the mere sight of the marble-hard white grapes on the fruit stand under the harsh Ural snow — and then dropped right back into his subconscious. The episodes accessible to Krylov's memory as an adult consisted in part of his parents' stories and in part of restorations from his imagination; it didn't seem possible to separate out the grains of what was genuine and what was unconditionally his. Just one episode was steeped in ammonia-like reality. All he had to do was wish to see it and in his mind an osier bush immediately flashed above the soap-green irrigation water, and in his hand he found a sliver of blue glass, curved, from a bottle probably, through which the flashes of sunlight on the irrigation canal looked (this is a later insertion) like welding sparks. Something sticky was smeared along the edge of the piece of glass, and on his finger, buzzing and thick, there emerged, as if from a half-shut eye, a fat red tear. Who was that stout man he knew, who leaned over him, smelling of sweat through his clean, blindingly white shirt? He demanded that Krylov throw it away that instant, or give him the glass, but young Krylov, smeared all over with blood, as if it were chocolate, stubbornly held his find behind his back and retreated into the leafy shade, which was as hot as splashes of tea (this is a later insertion). He felt it with inutterable clarity at the time: the blue sliver contained something that almost never occurs in the simple matter around us: transparency, a special, prof ound element, like water and sky.
Actually, it was dating from this episode that Krylov remembered himself, that he became aware of himself as an intact human continuity. His attraction to the transparent, to the mystery of the gem, which subsequently inserted Krylov into the true Ural mentality, must originally have been an emanation of the dry, flat Asiatic world, where water was highly valued, where everything earthly under the red-hot sky was divided into what would seem to be fit for being ground into pigment, on one hand, and untinted monotony, on the other. Young Krylov perceived transparency as a substance's highest, most enlightened state. Transparency was magic. All simple objects belonged to the ordinary world, this world. No matter how cleverly they were arranged or how tightly sealed, you could open them and see what they had inside. The transparent belonged to a world of a different order, and you couldn't open it up and get inside. Once young Krylov attempted to extract the orange glass-juice that was trapped in the thick walls of his aunt's vase and that was much better than the colorless water poured into the vase. One afternoon, on the balcony, on a carefully spread out newspaper, young Krylov struck the vase with a hammer, exploding its emptiness like a grenade in a war movie. The shards, though — some of them flew into the sneering sycamore or under his aunt's tubs — were just as self-contained as the intact object. Choosing the very best, bottom piece, with the thickest color, young Krylov continued to smash it on the scraps of the now slivered and silvered newspaper until he ended up with a totally white, hard powder. The only color in the powder came from his, Krylov's, unanticipated blood, which looked like a chewed up raisin. Not a drop remained in the powder of the transparency for whose sake his experiment had been performed.
The experiment that ended in powder made a much bigger impression on Krylov than the fatherly beating that followed. He had learned that what is transparent is unattainable and, like everything precious, is connected with blood. What he gleaned about stones at the children's library, where the papery dust choked him (Krylov could barely remember a time when he couldn't read), confirmed his intuition's findings. «Great Moghul,» «Excelsior,» «Florentine,» «Shah» — the names of the world-class diamonds were as much music to him as the names of world capitals are to romantics of another bent. Famous stones were the heroes of adventures on a par with d'Artagnon, Captain Nemo, and Leatherstocking.
Meanwhile, his mother and aunt had precious stones, too: large earrings on slender gold hooks, with pale blue stones, holding more patterns than a cardboard kaleidoscope; and four rings. One, bent, had a gaping black hole, but in the others marvelous transparencies winked like cat's eyes. Young Krylov was as certain of the high value of these objects as he was of the fact that the painting by Shishkin, Morning in the Piney Woods, hung in the living room of his neighbors, the Permyakovs, over their lumpy couch, whose solid dilapidation arose powerfully in his memory when a few years later young Krylov was secretly researching the museum's taxidermied deer and wolves. Later, when he had done some reading, Krylov learned that the picture was in fact held at the Tretyakov Gallery. It was hard for him to believe in the Tretyakov's reality and, consequently, Shishkin's painting itself vanished from reality. The world appeared to young Krylov as a string of copies without an original — assuming an original, striving to engender it with their spontaneous accumulation and merge with it, but in vain. All this wasn't formulated until much later, but the feeling joined the sum of those nonverbal intuitions that young Krylov was infatuated with and reveled in secretly from the adults. Even after his disappointment in the painting's copy, though, his belief in the precious stones kept in the shabby box covered in nettle-green velvet remained intact.
Young Krylov understood from the grownups' conversations that they all earned very little money. For some reason his aunt, considered a beauty, earned the least of all. She had a habit of puffing out her ribs, tensing the slender veins on her neck, and circling her waist with her hands so that the fingers nearly met in the crumpled silk of her shift; her hair, which poured smoothly down her back all the way to her waist, was piled up and hovered in the air like the striated smoke from his father's cigarettes. She was the first to lose her job. One day she came home walking — and looking — utterly off, as if her feet had kept landing in invisible holes, and to all questions she turned to face the wall. The old Yuryuzan refrigerator, which his mama and aunt had been planning to get rid of, chuckled with glee. To young Krylov, though, it seemed that both this refrigerator, and the worn red carpets, which in spots looked like colored batting, and the lack of a car of their own, which his father, who was nota thief, grumbled about on Saturdays behind his half-lowered newspaper — that all this was just a game because the family in fact kept a treasure. The certainty never left young Krylov that everything transparent was worth insane sums — and stones in gold settings weren't just any old buttons. In essence, he saw them as magical objects capable of granting Ivan the Fool's every wish. The very presence of these stones elevated his mother and aunt above ordinary laboring women with nasty-smelling kitchen hands into the ranks of titled ladies. That is, it gave them a special dignity, which later young Krylov dreamed of seeing in women but never did find. He dwelled for a time in the happy confidence that should some calamity suddenly befall them, the stones, sold to some fairy-tale merchants in luxurious turbans that looked like white roses, would save the day.